Despite being forced to cut more than a billion dollars in spending in order to balance the budget during the next two years, a fair and sensible way to curb spending in one of the fastest growing parts of the state budget — the cost of housing prisoners — has hit a roadblock that could kill the measure for the 2010 General Assembly.
So much for all the talk about overhauling the state criminal code in an effort to reduce the number of people in prison without jeopardizing the safety of law-abiding citizens. Key legislators continue to resist amending existing laws to reduce the punishment for some crimes out of fear of being perceived as being “soft on crime.”
The bottom line is this: The cost of housing inmates in the state’s prison has risen a whopping 44 percent since 2000. Only the costs of Medicaid and employee health care benefits have risen more.
University of Kentucky law professor Robert Lawson has repeatedly pointed to Kentucky’s stringent persistent felony offender laws as the major reason so many men and women are being housed in the state’s prisons, with many of them being convicted of non-violent offenses.
Rep. Johnny Bell, D-Glasgow, a practicing attorney who has seen first hand the effects of the state’s PFO laws, is planning to introduce legislation that would amend the law for non-violent drug offenders, but before Bell’s bill was even filed, House Speaker Greg Stumbo, D-Prestonsburg, spoke out against it. And if the Speaker opposes a bill, the chances of it coming up for a vote by the entire House range between slim and none.
Despite stacks of evidence to the contrary, Stumbo said he doesn’t see the PFO laws as a contributing factor to the corrections problem. Instead, he points to the “drug epidemic.” In one way, Stumbo is right, the drug epidemic is contributing to the overcrowded prisons, but that’s mostly because the PFO laws are sending those charged with relatively minor drug offenses to prison for longer periods.
Because of the need for legislators to make such deep cuts in spending, we had hoped they would have the courage to make tough, potentially politically unpopular decisions to curb the costs of prisons and of health care benefits for state and school employees.
Stumbo’s opposition to Bell’s bill to amend the state PFO laws virtually assures that there will be no meaningful prison reform this session and the cost of housing inmates will continue to soar at a time when state revenues are dwindling.
And frankly we don’t expect any more success with attempts to curb the soaring cost of health insurance for state and school employees. The fact that the cost of that benefit has soared by a 174 percent since 2000 should be all that legislators need to make changes in the status quo. But years of experience tells us that legislators lack the political courage to anger state employees by reducing their benefits — even if the state clearly can no longer afford those benefits.
Thus, state and school employees are likely to keep their benefits while programs that benefit every Kentuckian, and are desperately needed, are cut. That’s not right, but it’s politics in our state capital.
